


in the dusk

by ahandfulofstars



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Gem War, Gen, Homeworld Hierarchy (Steven Universe), Unhealthy Relationships, Unreliable Narrator, the terrifying renegade Pearl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 14:23:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17789051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ahandfulofstars/pseuds/ahandfulofstars
Summary: A pearl, a quartz, and a diamond, in the last days of the once promising Earth colony.





	in the dusk

The valley is so thick with the clouds of dissipated gems when Jasper emerges that the figures in front of her are only silhouettes, a shadow play of a brave war. They bring spears protruding out from their shoulders and whips from their knees, a set of dual swords from two different gems and, then, the blinding glow of fusion, ringing out across the battlefield. 

The force of it wisps away the smoke and standing there is an opal-- the earth is littered with defective amethysts that run away to the rebellion, and a drawing ground for off-coloured, flighty pearls so desperate for freedom they’ll pretend they have it at Rose Quartz’s hands. Jasper learns this in time, in her short burst of youth on earth before she is sent away from the shame of her birthplace, but now-- now, all she sees is a deity, four-armed, towering, creating a scythe out of sickles and a saber. The opal is certain, as she spins her weapon around the circle of beta quartzes-- carnelians and jaspers still dizzy from emerging, desperate trying to summon their weapons and learn their footing. She knows they are pathetic already. 

_Shatter the fusion_ , her agate says, so Jasper dons her helmet and charges. 

 

 

As Jasper follows the pearl up the foothill, she watches. The puff of her sleeves is so slightly translucent that the curve of the pearl’s shoulder can only be seen against the moonlight. She wears a prismatic dress with a flower, tucked into her hair (they are fragile, these earth things, and Jasper can already see it drying out). She looks like such a perfect prize. Jasper wants one. She’s heard of agates and morganites receiving pearls along with their holo medals, customized, fancy, and Jasper will fight for her diamond because she was made to, but she wouldn’t mind. All the carnelians and other jaspers are absent minded, sharp-tongued, slow fisted. They are imperfect, and when they speak to her there is a dissonance between them, much as they drag her into the brawling rings and on the edges of the diving pools, a distance from what they are supposed to be and what she is. But a pearl. A pearl’s job is to look pretty and project holograms, to hover, to sing-- easy jobs, delicate jobs. A pearl’s job is to please. 

The palanquin comes into view, painted pale seashell pink in the moonlight, and the pearl turns to Jasper, giving her a quick _please stay here_ and _our diamond will speak to you soon_ before she slips in between the sheer curtains. Her footsteps echo on the hard floor. 

Her diamond. Pink Diamond. Jasper falls into a kneel, lips pressed together to hold in all this buzzing, all this anticipation. The one she owes her whole being. She has heard, from the older quartzes and agates, of their diamond. Gentle, merciful, powerful. Pink Diamond is towering, five times the height of the tallest chalcedony, her hair styled in great spirals, her gloves shining and smooth as they block out the sun, and, in the centre of her stomach, her gem. Brilliant, lustrous, shining for the whole earth colony to see. 

Out from the drapes comes the pearl, again, and behind her, a massive shadow settles down. 

“My jasper,” a honeyed voice comes. “My perfect quartz. I’ve heard that you have taken out two battalions worth of gems in the Beta Kindergarten.”

“For you, my diamond,” Jaspers says, and her arms lock into a solute, golden eyes lidded. 

“Wonderful.” There is a detached feeling to that voice-- of course-- she is only a jasper. “I commend you for your service. My pearl,” she says, and the pearl steps up, a bubble in her hand faded pink. “As a reward, please accept this orchid from your beta kindergarten, before the development. As long as it stays in its bubble, it will not wither.”

“Thank you, my diamond.” Jasper holds her hands out and the pearl lets the bubble into them with her delicate fingers. Made by her diamond, and inside, the stamen of the flowers reach out, pollen floating like the stars hung in the sky. Blue Diamond gives away delicate crowns and Yellow military medals, but Jasper would rather this, stored away in her sleeping quarters. 

 

 

“My diamond--”

“You don’t have to call me that. Please,” Pink says, holding a hand out, and, with a quick look through the diaphanous curtains, she steps back. In their flutter as they return, Pink closes her eyes, brings her hands together over her gem, and glows a blinding white. Her head, thrown back to expose the length of her throat, adorns itself with long waves of curls instead of her puffed hair, her pearlish costume gives way to a flowing dress, her thin arms bulk until they might hold something. They might protect something. 

Rose opens her eyes. 

“Rose. Call me Rose.”

Pearl untangles her clenched hands with a short breath. 

“Rose. I doubt your bubble will have the effect you want on that jasper. All of them were born to fight unquestioning, and that one hasn’t even bonded with her fellow jaspers or carnelians-- likely, she’ll only become more loyal to the Diamond Authority.”

“But imagine, Pearl!” (Not _my pearl_ , not like this). “If she could see the beauty of earth, could fight on our side-- that flower is everything we want to protect. That flower is what we’re fighting for.”

“It would be good to have a strong fighter, I suppose.” Pearl looks down to her thin, pale hands. She’s shapeshifted her callouses smooth, her skin soft. “Yes--we do need quartz soldiers if we’re to fight.”

“It’s not about quartzes, Pearl-- every gem has the ability to fight. Bismuth, using her forge for swords instead of spires, lapises bringing all this ocean water to use against their invading armies, and you! A Pearl, meant to be an ornament, terrifying all the quartz soldiers in Blue’s court! You’re worth ten of them together.” Rose’s warm hand is on pearl’s bony shoulder, and pearl leans into it, thin lips coming up into a tentative smile as she continues. “We’re more than what homeworld makes us out to be. That jasper, she’s been told to fight, has been made to, but no one is programmed from the start to take out so many gems. She’s ambitious. She’s hardworking.”

“She’s shattered three amethysts and a padparadscha,” Pearl finishes, and, oh, she brings her hands to her mouth. No. No, she wouldn’t say anything against her diamond-- her diamond-- Rose-- brings Pearl’s hands away from her face, prying gentle. Her eyes ask Pearl to continue. “Our. Our amethysts. Our padparadscha.” 

“We can change.”

“Maybe your plantlife, and maybe even the humans can change,” Pearl tells Rose, every word weighted down with wrongness. “But it doesn’t come as easily to gems, does it?”

“It comes,” Rose tells her, eyes lidded and looking down at Pearl’s hands in her own. She places a kiss on the knuckles of them. “It has to come, Pearl. We’ve done so much. We’ve been through so much. It has to.”

 _Please_ , Pearl almost hears, but she would never say. 

 

 

“The remaining quartzes that do not come out will be of no use to us. Too small, or perhaps with a rebellious streak.” Blue walks with her long cloak trailing behind her, and, in the suffocating safety of the crook of her arm, Pink walks along with her, eyes lidded as she looks at the last plain rock faces where amethysts should have emerged, where a rose quartz might, still. “There is technology that we might use to repurpose them, but it would do us more good to use it for the greater war effort.”

Behind the two of them, bare, delicate feet taking care not to step on the diamonds’ wake, Blue Pearl walks like the birds of this planet, feet unfamiliar on the dusty, dry ground. Pearl watches her, and, with the cloud fluff of her hair blocking off everything above her pointed, sharp nose, cannot tell if Blue Pearl watches back. The gauze of her skirt floats in the breeze, the shade of her skin is like the pale cerulean of the highest skies of the sunrise, and Pearl wonders if she is made beautiful for her piety or in spite of it. Wonders what Blue Pearl ( _Blue_ , she had called her once, a slip-up in manners, a mistake never corrected) would look like with an epee. How Pearl would feel about her. 

“Pearl,” Pink says, commanding, gravitationally, as Venus to her spiralling moon. The reports are grim of what happened to that loving binary. 

“Yes, my diamond,” Pearl responds, head bowed, hands folded. Rose hates it. Rose hates it, but when she catches Pink’s eye, bored, barely too flighty for insolence, picture of how she was when she was first given the earth-- Pink does not mind. 

“Bring up the data for the amethyst emergence rates.”

Pearl closes her eyes and swipes her hand across detailed botanical illustrations and war plans before landing on the prime kindergarten statistics that she has saved. When she opens her eyes, the numbers are electric blue on a holo background. 

“Ninety-nine and a half percent,” she reads out. 

“A fair portion,” Blue Diamond concedes. “How many rose quartzes left?” 

The words slip off her tongue with disdain. 

“Nine still to emerge.”

“Take into consideration bubbling them, Pink. White is well aware of your sentimentality-- you can’t have it, running a colony. Pearl, send the statistics to Yellow. She’ll know what to do with them,” Blue says. Her pearl nods, touching the gem at her chest to store the command. 

“How is your new pearl, Pink?”

“Good.”

“She was a sufficient pearl under White, she should be more than suitable for your needs.”

“She is.”

“Have you made a decision on who to replace your rose quartz guards with? Those rubies are Yellow’s. You know how she is.”

(Bellicose. Those rubies are hers, through and through.)

“Jaspers,” Pink says. 

“Yes, yes. Amethysts and carnelians wouldn’t be focused enough. Your perfect soldier, a jasper, is she not?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I will inform Yellow. And remember, those amethysts we made, they’re smart, even if they don’t seem like it.” (Pink’s fault-- Pearl and Pink have both heard dozens of times.) “They can be good strategists. Use them.”

Blue steps on the warp pad, and her pearl follows, toes en pointe standing at the edge of the crystalwork. The folds of her gauze skirt flutter as she is beamed through the light, back to the galaxy warp. For the briefest of seconds, as her hair floats up like it would in empty space, Pearl can see the high cheekbones Blue Pearl forms, can almost see the whites of her eyes. 

Then they are alone, and Pink sighs, stretching out her arms. Though she wouldn’t dare to shapeshift back into Rose, she allows her gloves to dissolve into the air, disappears her shoes and stockings so she can feel the earth under them, no longer fertile but with life nonetheless, with the vibrations of the surrounding desert, the surrounding grassland. Her poised, pouting lips are bitten a brilliant opera rose and she runs a hand through her hair. Pearl has adorned that head with roses of sharon and hydrangeas, yarrow, jasmine, forget-me-not. 

“Let’s go home, Pearl,” she says. 

“Yes, my diamond.”

Eyes squinted in something simmering, something sharp, Pink Diamond doesn’t correct her. 

 

 

The next rose quartz steps into the hold, her hulking form bunched in on itself, her hunting eyes dociled. She looks up at the towering form Pink has manifested, at her long gloved hands, the only parts of her emerging from the shadowed shell of her cloak. She had borrowed the idea from Blue. 

“Facet 5, Cut P3H.”

“Yes, my diamond.”

“Retreat.” 

Pink’s voice is gentle. She had insisted on bubbling them when Yellow had told her she would bubble them personally, if she had to-- they would have used force, Pink told Pearl. They would have gathered twenty, thirty rose quartzes at once, and brought a storm down on them. Every mop of pale peach hair, every set of blush of dawn pink cheeks, every crystalline and off colour and perfect soldier.

Cut P3H closes her eyes. Like Rose does, when she takes on Pink’s form again. She wills herself, but it’s difficult. Where pearls are meant to be able to reform on command and sapphires meant to dissipate to protect their prophecies, quartzes are meant to fight until the bitter end. They are meant to rise from where they have been knocked down, meant to stand with their broken bones and torn skin. 

The rose quartz opens them, sorry. 

“Pearl.” 

Pearl steps in front of her diamond, in front of their carefully draped ruse, and pulls a sword out from her gem. In the pale blue halls of the mountain hold, the rose quartz’s eyes widen, she stumbles back. A pearl. The renegade pearl. 

She will not be let out before the war is through, Pearl has convinced Pink. 

Pearl strikes the quartz through her stomach, inches away from the five-faceted gem tucked above her hip bone. 

There is a cloud of the rose quartz’s form, and there is a gem in Pearl’s hands. She holds it delicate, careful to touch it with only the tips of her fingers, and brings it to Pink, who, beyond all their carefully woven cloth, beyond the shapeshifted form she must use to hide her true height, cries. She cries, her healing tears with no one to heal. 

 

 

Amethysts from the Alpha Kindergarten are stronger, more able, but more interested in the empty earth fields than the battles against the rebels, more interested in themselves. They come in thunder bays and deep siberians, with curled hair and pale skin or blue irises and lilac hair, a spectrum well cared for and well made. In their tight groups they lavish each other with the knowledge-- she watches them, pulling punches and kissing the facets of their partner’s gems. Free love, Pink Diamond calls it, encourages it between her amethysts, between her jaspers and carnelians, tells them it’s like camaraderie but does it feel better, like this? Are they happier, like this? 

(Jasper has never _kissed_ , this idea Pink Diamond thinks darling from the humans of the earth colony. She watches a pair of carnelians curl hands through each other’s hair in the midst of battle. She watches an amethyst twirl around a carnelian, light glowing bright as fusion before the amethyst steps back in shock.)

The Alpha and Beta divisions are combined in the zenith of the war, after all those rose quartzes have been lined up and dissipated. The amethysts mourn over them like Blue Diamond’s gems-- they comfort each other held close-- still, the amethysts lead the charges. Medals, gifts, how many a gem could take out, how well a gem could guard: useless. Jasper was not formed in a cloud of calm lavender, licentious mauve, electric violet. She is the colour of the sandstone of the rushed beta kindergarten, she is the colour of the weak jaspers with as much muscle on their bone as a pearl, she and the rose quartzes make up together the rise and fall of the once promising Earth colony and though she will fight until her teeth are dulled on some rebel’s sword, Jasper knows the Earth carries with it shame. It will never be as model a planet as the Binary Andromeda system or the head of the Cygnus Array-- Blue and Yellow Diamond’s first planets were given care, were scoped out and dismantled, repurposed, into their home bases. Pink Diamond cannot use Earth as a home base. She should not have to. When Jasper bends her knee, it is with apology, a plea for forgiveness for the stone she was made of but these amethysts. They act as if the earth is a gift, as if they are not failures. As if they will not be written over. Discarded. 

“They fuse frivolous. More pearls than soldiers,” another jasper says. “Did you see that carnelian and amethyst three cycles ago?” 

Jasper curls her fingers up, nails digging into the calloused flesh of her palm. 

“It’s disgusting,” she says. 

 

 

“Rose!” Jasper’s arms push her back up from the ground, aching with the effort of it, and she knows her shin has pushed up into her knee, her cheek is swollen where her body falters, her projection is unsteady. She knows. She brings back her helmet and bares her scream at rose quartz’s shield, at her renegade pearl’s thin needle swords-- what could they do? What could a pearl do with anything? 

Rose’s eyes train on her, shifting away from her coveted pearl, and she grips her sword tighter in her hand. A broadsword. A respectable weapon for a quartz, and though she is off-coloured (though she has been let through on the generosity of the very diamond she would shatter) she has good, broad shoulders. She has a strength that might crash the earth beneath them in two. 

She’s haughty. Her jaw is tilted up and her hands out, ready for a fight. Jasper steps on the edge of the canyon wall as far as she would without falling and she would jump. She would, if she didn’t know Rose would just float away. 

“Traitor!” she shouts. Her form glitches, about to fall apart and join the constellations of bare carnelians around her. 

“You’re destroying this earth.” Rose says, impassive.

“This Earth is a dying ground! This Earth is nothing more than a battlefield-- you’ve made it so! To go against her! Pink Diamond-- your leader-- your purpose!” 

Jasper holds the remnants of the name in her tongue like the embers of fire she has breathed out. 

“She is not my purpose. She is not yours.” 

Rose speaks with her chin held high, bright, bright curls sweeping away in the wind, and her pearl grips her twin sabres tighter, turnt away from Jasper. The edges of her vision grow blurry, one too many strikes taken from a circle of rubies and the rhodonite abominations, too many dissipated gems, too many, too many, too many. She falls onto the brunt of her knees and the hardened palms of her hands, and, gracelessly (she was not programmed with grace), Jasper comes undone. 

 

 

The dying ground, as that jasper had called it, is empty, and Rose takes Pearl’s hand as an afterthought as she floats both of them down, careful, to sit in the sea of her gems. They are vibrant, ferociously alive. They fight violently. They mourn violently.

Rose kneels, the spathes of her dress pooling around her legs, and picks up the sharp cut jasper, holds its edges in her hands. She lets go, unravelling and coming together to her true form. Trapped, runt of the litter, weak Pink. She brings the jasper close. 

“She won’t fight for the Earth,” Pink admits. In her long stockings, her puffed up sleeves, the pom-poms hovering above the arch of her foot, she is herself. She is trapped.

“She’s only one jasper. We have an army, my-- my Rose.”

Pink closes her eyes. The pout of her lips turn into a vicious scowl. The same Blue wears. 

“We have an army against us, Pearl. All these gems I’ve created, all of them I’ve asked for-- why?” Pink’s eyes begin to tear up. The jasper safe in her lap, her gloved hands curl, tense up, and come crashing down on the earth. The sky buzzes in her wake. “I don’t want this! I don’t want them to be like this, Pearl!” She closes her eyes tight, teeth bared. “I didn’t know! I-- I didn’t know.”

Pearl places her hand on Pink’s shoulder. She presses down on the thick, stocky fabric. 

“I hate this,” Pink says. Her back is slumped into a memorial arch. “She’s right. I have turned it into a dying ground.”

“You haven’t,” Pearl tells her. Her quiet voice is insistent in its rhythm, in its surety. Like the Moon rounding the Earth’s skies. “You’re fighting for it. You’re _Rose Quartz_. You’re the rebel leader. You’re the only gem beating back colonization.”

“I’m the gem who was given it. I’m the one who it was built for.”

“You’re not.”

Pink looks up, back into Pearl’s sure stance. She wears her sword fighting clothes with pride. The bluegreen calluses on her hands are like the bruise-mottled sea before a storm. The terrifying renegade pearl. 

“We’re not,” Pearl says. She looks down, to the Crystal Gems encircling them. “We’re the rebellion, Rose. We have to be.”

The jasper is left on the ground, under the forest fire haze of the skies. Rose stands. She pulls off those elbow length gloves, toes off the foolish shoes. She tosses off the stockings, rakes her hand back through the wispy mess of hair crowning her head. 

“We have to be,” Rose repeats. “And Pink Diamond has to shatter.”

 

 

Beyond the layers and layers of curtains hanging down from the shining waterline of the palanquin, Pink and Blue’s shadows are obscured. Blue Pearl is a small line in the folds, and Pearl is one outside it, standing with her hands clasped to the delve of her lower back, against the silky fabric of her dress. Jasper-- _the jasper_ , the world-turn axis-tilt jasper-- stands mirror, but the pull of her shoulders back reveals muscle, firm and strong, reveals stripes of bloody red that Pearl knows might have been the last vision she saw, had Jasper not been exhausted to collapse that day on the battlefield. She runs her hands across her knuckles, recklessly not yet healed over. This is Earth. This is what she is fighting for. 

“Pink Diamond will be able to see you shortly,” Pearl tells her, the name like an afterimage no one else has caught up to, and lets her eyes wander over the wild hair in disarray, the shining gem placed between two tired eyes. The war’s taken its toll on them all. The war’s collected its dues. 

Jasper bows her head in acknowledgement. She is quiet, haughty, for a quartz-- Pearl has had scores of amethysts greet her when she was alone, had met rose quartzes-- real rose quartzes-- in the kindergartens, all of them out bursting with love, with want. She has not heard a sound from this jasper when she was not yelling, screaming, Rose’s name. 

There’s a note of disappointment from Blue Diamond, too loud, too uncaring, that sets the layers of curtains in a wave, and Pearl flinches. She flinches, and turns to Jasper, on whom an expression of confusion, of anger, has sculpted her face soldier-sharp. 

To her, Pink is a deity, a goddess of war, the harsh light of the sun, the hand that brings the tides in and out and isn’t it hypocritical for Pearl to dismiss her for it? Jasper has fallen in love with a mural, with a shining pink portrait on the walls of each of the spires and arenas erected on earth, and Pearl, like a fool, has fallen in love with the gem, instead. She wants to hold Pink, wants to feel the cloud fluff of her hair against her chin, comfort her, tell her it will be alright, but she is a Pearl. 

She is a Pearl, and she does not know if it will turn out alright. 

 

 

The night is heavy on her like grief but Jasper does not know why, yet, why it lingers on her skin trying to stain her that same blue-black. Her hand draws out of a cloud where a bismuth used to stand, and on the ground, nestled into the dry bushes of this planet, the fragmented iridescence of it shines, catching the moonlight and reflecting it back on her, accusing her. Soldier, shatterer, Beta quartz. She feels the wind blow the mane of her hair from the nape of her neck and it leaves her cold. Her hands curl up at her sides and why is the battleground so quiet? Why has it become so quiet?

At the top of the hill, where her palanquin stands well behind their lines, Pink Diamond steps out, and Jasper can make out the grace of her figure. She turns to see her diamond, standing unobscured for the first time through ranges away, and around her, the rest of the army does the same. The rebel forces have been beaten back, and Pink Diamond’s quartzes bear the glitches and unsteady forms to show their allegiance. Jasper closes her eyes, takes in a breath, widening her form as her hands flow into a diamond salute, tips of her roughened fingers arching back to meet. 

This is why she was born of those barren cliffs, why she has been breathed life into. The buzzing feeling around her sloughs off her shoulders. 

When jasper opens her eyes, there is a cloud where her diamond used to be, cut through by a broadsword. 

Rose

Rose

Rose

 

 

The sun is filtered through the dust a bright, bright red, and when Pearl falls to the ground it is blocked out by that jasper, that hulking jasper with teeth like a tigress, picture of what they should have created on this earth instead of what they have done with it. 

“Your _master_ shattered Pink Diamond.”

“She is not my master,” Pearl lies. She tries to prop herself up, tries to slide her elbow so she isn’t sprawling on the ground, but Jasper kicks it out behind her, leaving the skin twisted. Pearl cries out. 

She is being played with, and she hits the solid earth a second time with resignation. If she looks up into the sky maybe she can see the soldiers Yellow and Blue are to flood the planet with. 

“She is. You are a pearl. You belong to Rose Quartz. You helped her shatter Pink Diamond.” The words come out breathy, unfocused. The whole colony is like that, now. Ruby and Sapphire had unfused, before the battle. Rose had spent the days leading up to it crying in Pearl’s arms. 

Kill me, then. Pearl levels her stare at Jasper. She has held the heft of Rose’s bare gem in her hand, felt the smooth planes of it. She has seen the same meadows Rose has laughed in with such joy, such joy worth a war for, razed to the ground by spare fire from Blue’s spaceships. She has been sliced through by carnelians and amethysts and whatever else stands tall on the battlefield ready to die for their diamond. Do they know she is the same? Do they know they are both circling and circling and circling and in the end, Pearl thinks to herself, there will only be shards on the ground and Rose coloured bubbles floating in the sky. 

“I do not belong to her,” Pearl manages through her torn throat. Her hands tighten against her thin swords and she sees in Jasper’s eyes the moment she will strike, sees Jasper pull back her arm.

She never strikes. 

There is the shine of Rose’s sword pushed through Jasper’s stomach, and she dissipates before she can even see it. 

Behind her, Rose’s curls whip in the wind like a flame. Her glossed pink lips have been left bloody-- still, absentmindedly trying to be like her humans-- but when Pearl sees her eyes, when the gale blows the strands of her bangs up and away from her scowling face, she is Pink Diamond. She is the same rage through which she yelled herself a planet, but so much worse. The sky behind her calls for blood and she offers Pearl a hand up, eyes already shifting to find the next soldier to attack, the next toy to break. Prodigal daughter, darling of the Diamond Authority, reckless, spitfire, the excess power comes off of her in waves. 

Why? Why does Pearl love her so much, so dearly? She stands, and before Rose can dart off, curls her fingers around Rose’s cheek. Rose turns, and Pearl rests her gem on rose’s shoulder. It’s no use from her, but she begins to cry, too. She grips onto Rose selfishly, grips unseeing with a death wish. 

“I love you,” she says. It is torn out of her. She has said it with joy, with wonder, with unfiltered hope. Finally, she says it with realisation. 

Rose’s shoulders go slack. She breathes in again. The anger is still there, still brought in by the harsh winds, but Rose looks up, lets her hair blow back behind her and lets the Earth sing its homecoming song. She feels Pearl’s hand poised tired on her bicep. 

“That’s why we’re fighting.” Her voice is still broken up, fractured, fragmented. She is a leader come undone. She is a soldier. She holds Pearl gentle. “For love, Pearl.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! 
> 
> I wrote the first draft of this last year, after _a single pale rose_ and _now we're only falling apart_ , still in the wake of the Pink Diamond/Rose Quartz reveal. 
> 
> If you want to find me, here's my tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/saltwatershell


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